What is the marathon but a 42.2-kilometre metaphor for carefully controlling what you can control and gracefully adapting to all that you can’t?
Whether you’re running the TCS Toronto Waterfront Marathon this weekend or beginning to taper for the Hamilton Road2Hope, or, hello, the TCS New York City Marathon in early November, there are a few things we know for sure.
We know it’s 26.2 miles, which we know is 42.2 kilometres, though unless we manage to run the tangents perfectly, it’ll probably be more.
We know how well we’ve trained, how much speedwork and how many long runs we’ve managed to complete, and we know that at this point, we can’t get much better but we can definitely still get injured.
We know they hide the wall around mile 19 or kilometer 30, which is when our muscles will run out of glycogen, and we know we can minimize its effect with sugar, electrolytes, caffeine, and water.
We know that “Nothing new on race day” is always good advice. We know that if we’ve never carb loaded with an all-dressed pizza before, we’re not going to start now.
And if it’s New York, we also know we run through the five boroughs, and we know that’s the title of an excellent Beasties Boys album that would make sense to put on any running playlist.
Then, of course, there’s all the things we don’t know. Will the weather be good, or bad, or hot, or cold, or will there be sideways rain hitting us in the face for the duration? Will the crowds be so dense throughout that we never really get into our groove until it’s too late? Will the steel-cut oats we’ve sworn by for years have gone off just enough to hit us with stomach cramps at the halfway mark? Will a new course record be set? We just don’t know.
And if it’s New York, we could be in the middle of a World Series between the Mets and the Yankees. If this subway series comes to pass, and if it goes down to the wire, Game 7 would happen the night before the world’s biggest marathon. Will we be running through mountains of ticker tape? Will the city that never sleeps be wired beyond belief? We just don’t know.
Oh, also: Two days after the race, Americans go to the polls to decide the closest presidential election in modern history. Will they elect their first female president? Or their last president ever? Are we headed into an era of renewed optimism and abundance, or a desperate vendetta of malevolence tempered only by incompetence? It’s a coin toss! As Canadians, we can only watch and wait. We just don’t know.
So for that marathon, for any marathon, and for life in general, we focus on what we can control. We know the distance. We fuel accordingly. We support those running around us. We avoid novelty for novelty’s sake. We trust our training. And we aspire to gracefully adapt to everything else.
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